Vet Check

Human history cannot be separated from animal life. We have hunted them, ridden them, feasted upon their flesh, worn their hides, worshipped them, tamed them, patted them, culled them, experimented with them, altered their environments, and sent them into space. Animals exist at once within, beyond, and beneath our domain. The callousness with which society treats them is allayed only (and marginally) by our decision to heal them.

Philipp Schott begins his survey of the “veterinary arts” with pictorial evidence of our brutality toward animals: nineteenth-century paintings of mad-eyed horses in the fray of the Napoleonic Wars. The accurate depiction of their fearful desperation is a sign, he says, that humanity’s “Circle of Concern” was finally expanding to include an acknowledgement of their welfare. “Awareness” is probably a more accurate word than “concern,” even if it was a time of great progress in the establishment of animal rights. After all, horses were ridden into battle for another hundred years and were abandoned for technological reasons rather than out of compassion. As Schott, a practising veterinarian in Winnipeg, shows, the evolution of animal care has always been balanced between “practical and emotional” values.

According to Schott, we’ve been looking after animal health since at least 12,205 BCE, when we first domesticated dogs. After that, treatments were “a potpourri of theories and remedies largely based on superstition, tradition, and anecdotal observation.” Diseases were seen as “divine punishment for sin,” with medicine acting as “a more theatrical version of prayer” against gods, goblins, and fairies. (Anglo-Saxon farmers turning up neolithic arrowheads thought they had recently been fired at their livestock by elves.)

Animal and human medicine waltzed together for millennia: coming together, separating, coming together, one giving momentum to the other’s progress. Slowly, veterinary practices left the domain of “cow-leeches, farriers, and folk healers.” The first veterinary school opened in Lyon, France, in 1761. Others followed in Britain, Sweden, and Egypt, among other countries. Canada’s Upper Canada Veterinary School opened in 1862. By the end of the nineteenth century, vet ed had gone global, with schools in Tokyo, Lahore, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne. These were primarily given over to the care of livestock, and even into the early twentieth century, “ ‘veterinarian’ was a fancy synonym for ‘horse doctor.’ ” But as animals lost their utilitarian roles in the world, vets became more closely associated with pets, a trend that continues today: in 2015, a study of vets in western Canada found that over three-quarters of their time was spent treating small animals.

In his acknowledgements, Schott recognizes the influence of Robert H. Dunlop and David J. Williams’s Veterinary Medicine: An Illustrated History, from 1996. Schott has essentially produced a rapid, jokey summary of that “dense” book, touching on many of the same subjects, applying his knowledge widely but superficially where Dunlop and Williams went intramuscular. One of Schott’s stylistic distinctions is to begin each chapter with a short fictional story centred on a historical figure, some real, some composites. His attempt to enter past minds is not the “unusual concept” he considers it (see, for example, Rebecca Solnit, Geoff Dyer, and Alicia Kopf). It’s limited by characters drawn straight from central casting. His prehistoric woman thinks in a kind of Cro‑Magnon prose; his Indians speak with a Yodaesque ESL. (“A handsome beast,” one says of an elephant. “Fearsome in battle. In what way is he unwell?”) His Romans orate and drink wine, his Frenchmen guffaw and drink wine, his Brits are either tut-tutting snoots or prudent yeomen.

Heal the Beasts works better when Schott applies his professional acumen more directly to past practices. Because he writes clearly about a technical and jargon-filled discipline, one doesn’t need to know the slightest thing about medicine to read the book. And while old manuals tell of fantastical-sounding conditions — windgalls, gullion, planet-struck, pissing evil, pole evil, stag evil — many of their meanings have been lost. Even someone like Schott can only guess at such ailments, so he makes a few deductions and spends more time puzzling over the dated and bizarre-sounding cures: Boil and eat the liver of the mad dog that bites you. Carve Christ’s name into the head of a sick horse with a magic knife. Hew a cat in two (head to tail), then wrap it around a strained sinew.

Beyond the obvious technological and scientific advancements, Schott attributes change in veterinary medicine to “more care, more empathy, and a broader definition of animal welfare.” Emotion and animals have always been inseparable (Homer’s Iliad is replete with sympathetic allusions to animals), yet we have come a long way since 1817, when the English veterinarian Delabere Blaine first gave credence to “the moral qualities” of dogs and paid heed to their “mental irritation, from fear, surprise, or regret.”

Schott credits another British veterinarian, James Wight (better known as James Herriot), for shifting the profession from “bluster and showmanship, and a kind of no-nonsense authoritarianism,” to today’s more “modest, sensitive, and compassionate” approach. Yet Schott’s idea of veterinarians as individuals who have necessarily found value in life beyond humanity presupposes that compassion was always a principle of the profession. Even in prehistory, he wagers, people attempted to heal animals for sentimental reasons — one of the defining notions of pet ownership. (Oddly, the origin of the word “pet”— a sixteenth-century term for a “small” or “petty” lamb — is relegated to a footnote.) We have, he continues, an animal-shaped void that we have long “unconsciously craved to fill.” Falcons and heavy horses have simply given way to “wolves on the hearth rug” and “tigers on our laps.”

It would have been good to see an expansion on these topics. How did the development of animal rights advance veterinary techniques? Or was it the other way around? How did other societal movements affect the profession? Were early veterinarians influenced by the idea that animals have a soul, for instance? Were there historically fewer Catholic vets, given the Catholic Church’s distinction between our “rational souls” and the “sensitive souls” of animals?

Indeed, I was left with many unanswered questions: How do veterinarians navigate the line between man and beast? Should they serve an animal’s base nature or an owner’s desires? What role did veterinarians play in extending an animal’s purpose beyond its brute labour? Did veterinarians influence the Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill of 1822, the first such piece of legislation passed in Britain? What, if anything, did they contribute to the creation of zoos, where animals are displayed much like gallery art? When did we pick up strange habits like brushing our dogs’ teeth? Schott’s book scratches lightly behind the ears, but a fuller examination is needed to answer these and related queries.